by Patty Jansen
They looped their arms together and helped me climb to Telaris’ shoulders.
Looking out over the people, I raised my voice. “Listen everyone. Be quiet. Listen to me.”
They did, sinking into an expectant silence. Most of the people close to me were guests. Some further krayfish stood at the place where the corridor opened into the pool hall.
“We have one hour and twelve minutes before this whole bunker blows up. We need to get out now.”
“Who are you?” a man asked. He was dressed in a business suit that would soon be far too hot and would get extremely dusty outside.
“I didn’t see you at dinner last night,” another man said, his voice doubtful.
“I’m not a guest of Mr Kray’s, and how I got here is irrelevant. Mr Kray is not who you thought he is, or who he was rather, because he won’t, ever, be making any more grand and illegal plans.”
Talk rose again, voices alarmed.
“You received my message about Mr Kray’s activities,” I continued, “My name is Cory Wilson. I am a representative of gamra and I’ve been here because ‘Mr Kray’ is one of gamra’s most wanted men. I have evidence for criminal activities, including slavery, smuggling and illegal production of arms—”
“That is just a rumour about the arms smuggling.”
“It’s true. He doesn’t import, but he exports these guns. The factory is right here in this complex. I could show it to you, and there is much more I could say, but we really, really—” I checked the time, which was going much too fast for my liking. “We really need to get out of here. We’re expecting action from outside and we need to clear this area before then. Urgently.”
Everyone started shouting. Telaris set me down. “For your safety, delegate.”
A man nearby yelled, “I’ve invested all this money. I want it back!”
“Yes, I agree.” Another voice yelled.
And someone else. “Me, too.”
“Come.” Thayu pulled my arm.
“But these people . . .”
“I don’t care if they don’t want to listen. You can’t save those who do not want to be saved. You told them. It’s their problem if they don’t want to listen. Now let’s go. Whoever wants to follow can do so.”
I didn’t agree with her. Telling them was one thing, but making them comprehend was another. Was there any way of saying, Look, there is a whopping great big alien ship out there that’s going to fire at this place, and if you stay here, you might well be vaporised along with the rest of this building, without actually saying that?
Thayu was already yelling, “Let us through!” in Coldi. Not that anyone would understand her. I thought the fact that she was waving a gun was more effective.
She led the way through the crowded corridor. Most people were now trying to follow us, but there was still a lot of confusion, a lot of shouting, all of it in languages I didn’t understand.
“Hey, mister.” A man pulled my sleeve. He was one of the tribe elders. “Mister, what’s going on? They say Mr Kray, he is dead.”
“Come with us,” I said.
I’d just checked the time again. We’d lost another ten precious minutes. We seriously needed to hurry, because when that thing in orbit went off, I didn’t merely want to be out of the building, I wanted to be as far out of the area as possible.
The old man protested. “No, mister. It’s hot out there. You have no trucks, you die.”
“You will die if you stay here.”
We had managed to come within about ten metres of that door. I had no idea if the car park would hold enough vehicles to take us all out, or if they needed keys we didn’t have, or if the vehicles could get out without security codes or cards.
Then a couple of men ran out of the parking area into the corridor. They shouted. They had guns. People at the front screamed and tried to run the other way. Some people fell, some were pushed into the wall.
We were swept up with the sheer mass of bodies. Nicha and Thayu positioned themselves on either side of me.
A bang went off that made my ears ring in that confined space. People screamed, pushing even harder away from the entrance. Others had dropped to the ground, covering their heads with their arms.
In a glimpse between two people, I saw a couple of krayfish guards, their backs to the door, guns raised. As I watched, another shot into the crowd.
Next to me, Nicha was looping his hands together. Thayu put one foot in them. As she hoisted herself up, she took the big gun from Evi.
I realised what she was going to do.
“No, Thay’!” She would be a target.
Nicha lifted her. Thayu rose over the crowd, raised the gun, pushed the release. A white flash went off, followed by another one, and another one.
A shot rang out. Thayu fell. She crashed into me and I fell sideways into the man next to me, and we all tumbled to the ground.
I yelled out, “Thayu!” My head was spinning. I’d lost her. “Thayu! Are you all right?”
A voice sounded behind me. “Calm down, I’m fine.” She was helping up the man who had fallen down with us.
“That looked to me like you were hit. I told you—”
“Shh. Seriously. Calm down. This is my job. I’m not stupid enough to get hit.”
Telaris had picked up the gun Thayu had dropped. He ran between the people, all of whom were by now cowering on the ground with their arms over their heads. He reached the door, raised the gun and fired three shots. Then he let the gun sink. He nodded. “It’s safe now.”
“I’m sorry,” I said to the man who had taken most of our weight. He was wiping dust off his trousers.
People were already streaming out, sidestepping the bodies of the guards. Women streaming past raised their scarves over their noses.
We followed the stream of people through the door into a dark, low-ceilinged area, where sparse emergency lights cast ghostly light over rows of vehicles.
A couple of men in business suits were trying to break into the closest truck by climbing on the doorstep and pulling the handle as hard as they could. Another was trying to break the glass by bashing a travel bag into it.
“Excuse me.” Nicha pushed between them, climbed up on the step, put his reader against the lock, and opened the door. He climbed in, slid back out, opened the back panel which held the engine, and did something inside. The truck’s lights went on. He moved to the next vehicle, and the next one.
People climbed into the vehicle, into the back, or the cargo holds or trays. A lot of guests were still streaming out of the door. I hoped there were enough trucks. With all this messing about, we had lost another twenty minutes.
Thayu had gone to the car park’s entrance and forced open the door. Bright midday light came in through the opening.
The first truck had been waiting and it went up the ramp into the sunlight.
Forty-five minutes, and so many people still to get out.
Maybe I should ask Asha to hold off.
Wait—why was it so quiet in my head?
I raked my hand through my hair.
“The feeder . . .” I couldn’t feel it in the place where it was supposed to be. It must have fallen out, but I couldn’t see it anywhere.
CHAPTER 28
* * *
I RAN AFTER THAYU, who was trying to cram more passengers into a mini bus that Nicha managed to start. She was yelling, waving her hands. “Sit on the floor. No, you sit on his lap! Now you, get in.” She was yelling in Coldi, but the people manage to get the gist of it anyway.
Nicha was working on one of the two remaining vehicles in the huge underground parking space. He had opened the hood and was using his reader to override
the locking software. This sort of thing was handy, but it scared me at times. I preferred not to think about just how much of Earth’s technology was rigged with little Coldi bugs.
It was a truck with a container on the back. Several people were already in the cabin, and a couple of men had opened the back door to the container. It was full of boxes and they were lifting these onto the ground so that people could get in. About twenty people were still waiting.
“Thay’, hang on!” I ran up to her.
“What?” Thayu turned around.
“Are you in immediate contact with your father?”
“Only through the exchange.”
And that meant you had to book a slot in advance. Damn it.
“Is there a problem?”
“I lost my feeder in the corridor back there. I have no idea where it went.”
Her eyes widened. “Shit.” And then again, “Shit.”
“Can you try to contact him? Tell them that it’s urgent.”
“I’ll try.” She took out her reader. “I don’t know if we’ll be given anything like the priority we’d need.”
The minibus drove past, groaning under the weight of passengers, throwing up a cloud of dust. My teeth were gritty with dust, my arms and face were covered in a sheen of sweat and goodness knew what else.
I went and helped the men unload the container, throwing the boxes on the ground. Some split open, spilling their contents over the concrete: little packets with plastic clips, bottles, plastic petri dishes. What the hell was all that for?
We hoisted up a number of passengers, mostly older men and women. I jumped out, a few younger men climbed in and the truck took off.
Now it was just us.
The last vehicle was a small truck with a cargo tray. It had once been red, but was now more pink than red. Judging by its position, it hadn’t been used much for quite a while.
Nicha was at the front, pulling at various leads inside the engine.
Thayu called at him, “Hurry up!”
“I’m not sure how this one works!” he yelled back. “I can’t find the computer.”
I stared at the dusty inside of the engine. A distant memory came to me. When I was a young boy growing up in New Zealand on the Bay of Islands, an old man named Pete would drive up and down the beach each morning, dragging a rake to collect large items of plastic rubbish that had washed up overnight. He was a bit of an odd character. He didn’t need to do this, and he wasn’t paid for it, but he did it anyway.
He had an old, old tractor that sounded like a chainsaw and blew clouds of black smoke. Us kids used to run after it—it wasn’t very fast—and sometimes he would let us drive it. He said it had belonged to his grandfather, and not until later had I realised that I’d been allowed to touch and learn to operate a precious piece of history that, anywhere else in the world, would have been displayed in a museum with big Do Not Touch signs all over it.
It had . . .
I opened the door and climbed into the cabin. Yes. I was right. There was a key. The krayfish had even left it in the car.
I pushed myself behind the wheel. “Nich!” I yelled through the window. He straightened and looked at me, mouthing, what?
I turned the key. The engine made a strangled sort of noise before falling quiet again. Nicha jumped back. “Whoa!”
Now. How did this work again?
Once again, I was a little boy, and I felt Pete’s hands on mine. Make sure you have your foot on the brakes. Turn the key. Press the accelerator.
The engine started with an incredible racket. I balled my fist. “Get in!”
Nicha climbed into the cabin, followed by his sister, and Evi and Telaris went into the tray at the back.
I steered the truck up the driveway. It was making a lot of noise and smoke, and didn’t go very fast. Out into the brightness of the day. I followed the tracks made by the other vehicles.
The truck crawled up a little hill. We were to the side of the underground settlement. To the right, the land sloped down to the water. Mr Kray’s mansion lay halfway down. To the left was the building site, with sheds, stacks of materials and concrete foundations in trenches. Several concrete pillars had been built ready for the first floor to go on.
I looked at the clock. We had a mere fifteen minutes left and seriously needed to get out of here much faster than this. The road led past the length of the site.
The truck ploughed down the hill. It didn’t have any trouble with the sand at the bottom, but it was so, so slow, no matter how hard I pressed the accelerator, it just seemed to make more noise.
I remembered something else. Pete had said, “This setting here is for driving on the beach. That one there, you don’t touch. It’s for when I go home on the road.”
It had been a sliding stick set in the dashboard. This truck didn’t have anything that looked like that.
“What are you looking for?” Nicha asked.
“There has to be some sort of gear control thing, a handle or lever to make it go faster.”
Nicha bent and looked in places where I couldn’t because I had to see where we were going.
“Did you know this thing was built in 2031?”
“Sheesh.” It was probably even older than Pete’s truck.
“What about this?” He moved one of the handles behind the steering wheel.
Nothing happened.
And another one. The windscreen wipers came on, spreading dust over the window.
“Hey! I’m supposed to see where we’re going.”
Thirteen minutes.
“And this one?”
I had no idea what he did, but we stopped dead. I pressed the accelerator, but the engine only made a lot of noise.
“Come on, Nich’. Put it back where it was.”
He did something else.
The truck jumped forward.
“Whoa!” I took my foot off. Then slowly pushed down again.
The truck gathered speed. Come on, come on. We tore past the side of the building site, up another hill, down the hill and following the tracks that led away. I looked at Thayu’s screen over her shoulder. The little dot moved away from the site.
Ten minutes.
Over bumpy and rocky ground, through a sand drift, up another hill.
Seven minutes.
Over another hill, and there we found the other trucks, in the company of a whole bunch of people on foot, all of them walking down the road. Some of Mr Kray’s distinguished guests had exchanged their positions in the back of the trucks with women and old men, and weak and injured people. The gun factory workers.
There were a lot of people on foot. They were going too slow.
Evi yelled out the window. “Hurry up, hurry up!”
Five minutes.
We were not going to make it any further. I just had to hope it was far enough. I drove the truck off to the side and past the vehicle in front. I called out the window, “Stop, stop!”
The driver did.
“Get into the truck everyone. Shut the door!”
They didn’t understand.
Four minutes.
Evi and Telaris had jumped out the back. They were physically lifting people up so that they could get into the back of the truck. It was the one with the container, and more boxes were thrown into the sand.
Three minutes.
Nicha found a folded-up tent cloth. He went out and helped people into the tray of our truck and covered them with the cloth.
Two minutes.
We tied the ropes of the cloth onto the tray. We shut the back door to the container. We pushed two very skinny kids onto the
mini bus. Shut the door to that, too.
One minute.
We ran back to our truck. Scrambled in. Shut the door. Nicha had wound up the windows and it was hot in the cabin.
Thirty seconds.
I wiped sweat from my forehead. The smell of Coldi sweat was overwhelming. “We can open the window on the side away from the blast.”
“There will be lots of dust.”
Fifteen seconds.
“We’ll die in here if we leave it shut.”
Thayu opened the window. A head poked out of the back door of the truck.
Nine seconds.
I waved at the boy to go back inside.
Six . . .
He waved back to me.
Four . . . three . . . two . . . one . . .
I looked over my shoulder out the little window in the back of the cabin. Couldn’t see anything except desert, blue sky and the khaki cloth. The little boy had ventured onto the bottom step of the ladder into the back of the truck.
Then: a blight flash.
The boy yelled out.
The blinding white light bloomed out over the sky. Grew stronger. Came down like a giant bolt of lightning.
I ducked.
A loud crack split the air, like thunder hitting really close. Thayu tensed against me.
A moment later, the shock wave hit. The truck wobbled. For a moment I feared it might tip over, but it landed back on its wheels. Clouds of dust rolled over us, reducing visibility to zero. Dust rained on the windscreen and slid down the glass to come to rest on the windscreen wipers. Thayu pushed the window shut again.
I didn’t pay attention to how long we sat there, but gradually the dust settled, the wind stopped and visibility increased a bit. The truck next to us was fine, but the minibus had tipped over.
I opened the door, and stepped into knee-deep fine sand.
It was eerily silent.
People were stirring in the tray at the back.
Evi had already jumped off and was shaking sand out of his hair. He checked the gun, and put it back in the bracket at his belt. He went to help the people get out of the minibus.